July 8, 2012 -- New Politics -- Carrying signs denouncing fraud, tens of thousands of students and
other voters marched through Mexico City on July 7 to protest what they
see as the government’s imposition on the country of presidential
candidate Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party
(PRI). Peña Nieto received 38 per cent of the vote, compared to 32
per cent for Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the left-of-centre Party of
the Democratic Revolution (PRD), and 25 per cent for Josefina Vázquez
Mota of the conservative National Action Party (PAN). López Obador
claims that the election was fraudulent and has called upon the election
authorities to investigate claims of vote buying.

Students, however, have led the protests. In addition to the
mass march in Mexico City, they also marched in smaller numbers in
several other major Mexican cities, including an impressive
demonstration by an estimated 7000 in Guadalajara on July 6. The
protest was organised largely through social media by the “I am #132”
movement which has dogged Peña Nieto for two months, criticising in
particular his close ties to the powerful Televisa television network.

The Mexican Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) has declared Peña
Nieto the winner, though final tallies are still not in. IFE says it is
investigating alleged vote buying. Students carried signs reading "IFE:
Institute of Electoral Fraud". The protest, after rallying in the Zócalo,
Mexico’s national plaza, ended up at a wedding of television stars
being broadcast by Televisa.

Imposition claimed in 1988 and 2006

The idea of the government imposition of a candidate resonates
in Mexico where many believe that the government imposed candidates who
actually lost the presidential election in 1988 and in 2006. In 1988,
Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas may have actually defeated Carlos Salinas de Gortari
who was declared the winner. Cárdenas told me in 1996 that he had not
led a national movement to demand that his victory be recognised because
he feared violence that might end in a bloodbath. Similarly, there is
good reason to believe that Andrés Manuel López Obrador may have won the
2006 election, though the IFE declared Felipe Calderón to be the winner
by a margin of 0.58 per cent of the vote. Protesting that decision López
Obrador mobilised his followers who rallied in Mexico City by the
hundreds of thousands and eventually 1 million blocking the city’s major
thoroughfares, while leftist legislators attempted to block Calderón’s
inauguration in a chaotic Congress, where representatives of the rival
parties came to blows. Calderón was finally smuggled in by a back door
and sworn in before Congress to the applause of the right and the
chanting and jeering of the representatives of the left.

Vote buying scandal grows

The students protest came as the PRI’s alleged vote buying
scandal continued to grow with well-substantiated allegations that the
PRI had spent hundreds of millions of dollars (estimates range from $250
to $500 million) to purchase plastic gift cards worth approximately
$7 each which were used by PRI operatives to buy votes. The PRI
apparently bought the cards from Soriana, Mexico’s largest retail chain,
and distributed them to voters in exchange for the promise to vote for
Peña Nieto. The dispersal of so many cards led to long lines of
customers at stores in some areas.

The PRI, which ruled Mexico from its founding in 1929 until
2000, is infamous for its political machine and for corruption.
Throughout much of its history it ruled a one-party state where workers
in government industries, public employees, workers in the private
sector and peasants were taken to the polls to vote under the eyes of
their employers and the political bosses. Soldiers’ ballots were
sometimes filled out and cast by their officers. The PRI machine bought
other votes with barbeque and beer or with promises of metal lamina for
the roofs of concrete block houses and milk for children. The PRI claims
to have become a modern and democratic party, but it seems to many that
simply means that they use a plastic gift card with a magnetic strip
rather than a taco and a bottle of beer to buy a vote.

PRI returned to power

By Dan La Botz

July 5, 2012 -- New Politics -- The PRI is back in power. Enrique Peña Nieto of the
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has won the Mexican presidential
elections with a plurality of 38 per cent of the vote, returning to
power the party which ruled Mexico as an authoritarian one-party-state
for decades. Peña Nieto defeated the left-of-centre Andrés Manuel López
Obrador of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) who got 32
perc ent of the vote and Josefina Vázquez Mota of the conservative
National Action Party (PAN) who received about 26 per cent. For the
Mexican left, the election results are a stinging defeat not only at the
presidential level, but also in the congressional elections.

López Obrador, who claims to have won the last election, has not
accepted the election results either and is asking the electoral
authorities to investigate. Thousands of his supporters marched through
Mexico City the day after the election, claiming that their candidate
had once again been defrauded of his victory. López Obrador claims that
Peña Nieto and the PRI violated spending limits; he argues that through
fraud they have stolen 1 million votes. The Mexican electoral
authorities have agreed to recount more than half the ballot boxes
because of irregularities found in vote tallies. Peña Nieto won the
election by more than 3 million votes according to the authorities.
The PRD, however, won again the mayoralty of Mexico City with 60 per cent
of the vote and won the governor’s elections in the states of Morelos
and Tabasco. The PRD thus remains a political power in the country
though it did not win the presidency and has a minority in the congress.

While López Obrador attributes his loss to his opponents’
violations of election law and fraud, his own decisions no doubt also
had an impact. In 2006 the Mexican election authorities reported that he
had lost by a quarter of a million votes and many believe he actually
won; this time he lost by more than 3 million votes and no one but
his most ardent followers are asserting that he was the winner.

Why did
López Obrador lose in 2012? Perhaps it’s because he abandoned the more
radical rhetoric of his 2006 campaign, which led the media to compare
him to Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and this time portrayed himself as a
moderate reformer who would follow the example of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da
Silva, the former president of Brazil. López Obrador sought this time
around to win the confidence of the Mexican business establishment and
of Mexico’s middle classes, while still holding on to his traditional
base among working people, peasants and the poor. Did some of his
potential voters lose confidence in a candidate who changed his identity
from left to centre? Perhaps. In any case, the move to the right
clearly failed to improve on his 2006 performance.

The future: a PRI – PAN alliance?

The PRI in power under Peña Nieto will not for the foreseeable
future be in a position to recreate the one-party state that it was in
the past. While final statistics are not yet in, the PRI will likely
have little more than 240 seats in the 500-seat lower house. The PRI
will only be able to rule by making an alliance with the PAN with which
it shares a common economic program, and the PRI and the PAN together
will have just enough votes to make it impossible for the PRD to block
their program. Mexico’s former foreign minister, Jorge Castañeda, believes
the outcome of the election will lead to cooperation between the PRI
and the PAN on the basis of their common economic agenda. Under a Peña
Nieto presidency and a PRI-PAN alliance, Mexico’s neoliberal policies
will continue and will expand, with the country likely to see continued
piecemeal privatisation of the petroleum industry and the passage of a
labour law reform bill that would weaken trade unions. There is also, however,
the possibility of political deadlock, an alternative that led to a fall in Mexican stock prices as the election results were reported.

The student movement, too little too late

Peña Nieto, who had the support of the powerful Televisa network
and of the PRI’s powerful political machine, faced a rising challenge
in the month before the election from a new student movement
that criticised his links to the mass media and his record of political
repression in Mexico State where he had been governor. The student
movement expanded from the elite Ibero-American University, to the
National Autonomous University of Mexico, and then to state university
campuses throughout the country, raising its cry again money’s
corrupting power in the media in ways similar to the American Occupy
movement.

But the student movement, known as “I am #132", which grew
rapidly and attracted attention from throughout the country, was still
too little and too late to change the election victory for Peña Nieto
and the PRI that had been predicted for months by the polls. The
question now is, will the student movement that arose out of the 2012
presidential election be able to continue as a significant social
movement once Peña Nieto takes power? Other student movements of the
late 1960s and the mid-1980s had an important progressive impact on
society at large, and this one may too if it can recover from the
election hangover and tackle the society’s economic and social problems.

The PRI’s past

The Institutional Revolutionary Party has its origins in the Mexican Revolution. It was created in 1929 by President Plutarco Elías
Calles as the party of government functionaries and transformed by
President Lázaro Cárdenas in the late-1930s into a mass party of workers
and peasants.

By the 1940s the PRI had become an authoritarian and
corrupt party with a nationalist economic program; it oversaw the state
banks and industries, encouraged private capital and used its control of
the labour unions and peasant leagues to ensure labour peace. The
“Mexican Miracle” of the 1950s and 1960s was based on the PRI’s policy of
keeping wages down, though providing workers with subsidised health
care, housing, food and fuel. By the 1980s, however, the PRI abandoned
its nationalist economic program and adopted neoliberal policies to
encourage foreign investment, open markets to free trade, cut the social
budget, and weaken labour unions. Since the 1970s, the PRI had loosened
its hold on the political process and by the 1980s there were growing
political parties left and right.

When the PRI turned right in the 1980s, the nationalist wing,
led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas broke off forming the Democratic Current and
then a National Democratic Front, which also included the former Mexican
Communist Party and other left groups. Cárdenas ran as the National Democratic Front’s
candidate in 1988 and is widely believed to have won the election, but
the PRI president Miguel de la Madrid and the electoral authorities
declared Carlos Salinas de Gortaria the winner. Salinas then oversaw a
vast privatisation of industry that transformed Mexico’s political
economy. In the election which just took place, Salinas supported Peña
Nieto, and some argued that Salinas will be the power behind the throne.

The PAN’s failure

In 2000 Vicente Fox, a Coca-Cola company executive, businessman
and rancher, ran as the National Action Party’s candidate for president
and won, ending over 70 years of rule by the PRI. Fox had received votes
from both the right and left, from all of those who wished to end the
long rule of the PRI. Fox oversaw the emergence of multi-party political
democracy, but did little to change the economic direction of the
country. Many were surprised to see him maintain the alliance with the
country’s corrupt official unions. When Fox retired, he left to his
successor Felipe Calderón the country’s continuing economic difficulties
and its fundamental social problems. In this election, Fox declined to
support the candidate of his own party, Vázquez Mota, and instead
endorsed the PRI’s Peña Nieto as the best option for voters.

For the last six years, Felipe Calderón, also of the
conservative PAN, has held office, pursuing a war against drug dealers
that saw the deployment of 40,000 soldiers and thousands of police
officers, widespread violations of human rights, almost 60,000 killed,
10,000 disappeared and thousands forced to leave their homes for other
states. He has also presided over an economic crisis that saw annual per
capita growth of less than 1 per cent throughout his term, with
millions unemployed and a growing number of youth who could neither
continue their education nor find jobs.

Real GDP growth
for the last dozen years has averaged 2.3 per cent, low for a developing
country. Some have argued that the terrible economic situation helped
to drive tens of thousands of Mexicans to seek work in the illegal drug
trafficking business. Calderón thus became tremendously unpopular with
the Mexican people, making PAN candidate Vázquez Mota’s campaign an
uphill battle. The people punished Calderón and the PAN by denying her
their votes.

The left’s future

Mexico’s left, which invested so heavily in the rightward-moving
López Obrador, must ask itself whether it made a mistake and might not
have done better pursuing some other alternative. Lacking confidence in
the Party of the Democratic Revolution, López Obrador created his own campaign organization called MORENA (Movimiento para la Renovación Nacional
or Movement for National Renovation). MORENA became an umbrella for a
variety of social movements and small left political parties who stood
under it or just outside of it, anxious to find a candidate who could
advance the left. Speaking to the left, López Obrador said he wanted
“real change”, and the revolutionary left interpreted this to their
followers as “regime change” that would restore democracy and create a
popular political economy. The appearance of the student movement “I am
132” encouraged the left to believe
that their time had come. The Mexican left thus embraced a rightward-moving populist, a strategy that in the wake of López Obador’s defeat
leaves it disappointed and disoriented.

What is new and exciting coming out of the election is the new
student movement. On July 4 in Guadalajara, one of Mexico’s largest
cities but also generally a conservative one where the largest
demonstrations by social movements, unions and the left seldom exceed
500 people, students using social media organized a 7000-person protest
against Enrique Peña Nieto and the PRI. Something is happening among
Mexico’s young people and they deserve to have options on the left
besides populism; their demand for democracy and social justice needs to
find expression in a revolutionary rejection of capitalism and a vision
of democratic socialism. If the left is to offer it, it must critically
examine its own illusions regarding the existing political system, its
parties and its candidates.

[Dan La Botz is a Cincinnati-based teacher, writer and activist. He is the editor of Mexican Labor News & Analysis. He maintains a blog on Mexican politics HERE.]